Email trends to watch for 2017

Email continues to be one of the most-used options for consumers to contact or follow brands, and according to one expert, email newsletters will continue to be hot through 2017. Here are three trends to follow in the email space in 2017.

"As the major mailbox filters get more sophisticated, senders will need to know as much as they can about a user's engagement with a brand. While the inbox actions are mainly what the filters will be reacting to, marketers should incorporate things like site activity and product preferences when deciding which content to send to the users that also engage in the messages themselves," said Scott Heimes, CMO, SendGrid.

Second, look for email newsletters to continue to rise

"Companies like The Skimm and The Hustle have made an entire revenue model out of email newsletters. As ad blocking continues to rise and social media's ROI remains hazy, more brands will be turning to the email newsletter, an old standby, to build a more stable, monetizable relationship with their audiences," said Andrea Bridges-Smith, Product Marketing Manager, PostUp. "The new metric for success going forward won't be how many eyeballs see your content, but how many times those eyeballs come back for more, and email is a great way to continue engaging. The LTV of drive-by users from social media is tiny compared to the LTV of engaged, repeat users, and brands will have to adjust their communication strategy accordingly. In short: it's all about developing relationships."

Third, expect more difficulty reaching the inbox

"It is still a ticking clock for the final date when Gmail and Microsoft update their DMARC policies and completely move to "p=reject" and no sender will be able to send from their domains unless they are those organizations. They originally planned on this being in June 2016, then sometime this "fall." But, regardless, this should be top priority for any mail program that uses these domains in their "from" address to move to sending from their own domain instead to ensure deliverability," said Heimes.